The club today announced it made a profit in the year ending June 2008, ending last season £28k in the black, down from the previous season's profit of just over £100k. The figures include monies from the sale of Chris Cohen and Arron Davies to Nottingham Forest and also the costs incurred in setting up the centre of excellence.

Good news on the face of it then, though one wonders what the loss would have been if it wasn't for the sale of Davies and Cohen. Still, the club's policy is to identify and then contract young players who they can sell on for a profit after a season or two at the club and in Cohen and Davies's case that's a policy that has worked. This season Lee Peltier is the willing sacrificial lamb but last season we sold no-one - next season's balance sheet will almost certainly show a considerable loss.

While it would be churlish to be ultra-critical, worries do persist. There are occasional warnings on the green room concerning the club's abysmal credit rating and word of mouth stories regarding local businesses reluctance to deal with the club on anything but a cash in advance basis. Attendances are down again, and the appalling state of the beer tent means the club's efforts to maximise matchday income are hamstrung before they've begun. The snack bars are uniformly dreadful, selling overpriced rubbish and running out of staples like chocolate bars before the game even kicks off in some cases.

I'm not moaning for moaning's sake here. A decent social club and well-run and well-stocked snack bars can make good money for any club -look no further than the examples of Walsall and Kidderminster for proof. At present the club has all it's eggs in the basket of player sales to enable it to operate in the black, and that's ultimately not a sustainable policy. No club can carry on selling off its best players year after year before eventually being found out, and that particular well will run dry sooner or later anyway. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it's the board's responsibility to maximise income off the field and at present it's not doing enough.

Still, in these times of insolvencies and clubs going into administration any profit is cause for reasonable satisfaction. I just wish I could be confident that the club had a plan B in place for the day that plan A fails. We've been in the football league for 6 years now and are established on the pitch. Facilities off the pitch are still mired in the ICIS League.

Edit - For an in depth look at the state of the accounts, have a look at this excellent Ciderspace news page piece. It's also worth reading the following, Badger's self-explanatory follow-up post on the green room. I'll reproduce it below as the link above won't work once the message on the green room has been purged.

Some additional comments from those made on the CNP that I didn't include because I felt they were deviating into the realms of opinion and conjecture:

The claim was made that the 2007-08 playing budget was the "biggest ever". Based upon the accounts, wages have gone up by 1.95% but 10 additional staff have been employed to take on "management and administrative" roles, one of which will of course be the separation of the Chief Executive role which happened in December 2007. The clear inference was that the Cohen/Davies money had been piled into the playing budget. That bit clearly isn't true as the net increase in wages from the previous season is around 45K, of which the off-the-field increase in employment would swallow probably more than that. Certainly no evidence of any reinvestment back into the playing squad there. In fact in the club's own words, they state that the additional expenditure was to set up the Community Trust and CoE, so I'd guess that's where the Cohen/Davies money went. If so then I wish that had been stated more up front, as it's not controversial and does have a long term aim.

The second claim was that all of the Cohen/Davies money was spent inside one season. That obviously contradicted the 2006-07 accounts so was contentious anyway. But the fact that the increase in Trade Debt is roughly 50 percent of the net surplus figure given for the Cohen/Davies transfer, shows that the other 50 percent should have come in during the 2008-09 season. Hence I'd tend to believe the 2006-07 accounts statement rather than what was subsequently claimed.

Thirdly yep, it shouldn't be just about seeking to cut costs, as in cutting costs you can risk cutting quality. The club need to look at how to increase income - such as why beer supplies and tea bars run out before half time, or why a supporter trying to buy a season ticket was turned away for having slightly awkward payment terms to deal with.

Although it's great that the club have made a profit again, the obvious concern is that without the (presumed 50 percent share over two years) Cohen and Davies money coming in, it would have been a 300K shortfall. Hopefully the 300K "subsidy" will also apply to the 2008-09 accounts and that if Peltier gets sold, then another 300K would come in. But that's obviously a ticking timebomb and may show why they cut the playing budget by 25 percent last summer. What they need to do though is to bridge that 300K gap by other means, by additional income, as inevitably if it's the playing budget that is cut, then it's the quality of the squad and the punters who turn up that will get hit.

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